Mary Portas's bottom line

One answer to Freud’s immortal question: “What does a woman want?” might be:
“She wants a comfortable and flattering pair of knickers, that won’t annoy
the hell out of her, or be visible once she’s dressed.” Alas, this holy
grail is rarely achieved.

In Mary’s Bottom Line, a three-part Channel 4 series, our heroine, enraged by the impossibility of buying British, exploits a what she sees as a minute window of opportunity to resuscitate UK manufacturing as oil, cotton and overseas labour prices rise.Photo: CHANNEL 4

By Hannah Betts

3:46PM GMT 03 Mar 2012

Until now. For here, in a west London café, Mary Portas is showing me her pants. The Carry On movie aspect is fully intended. The Telegraph columnist’s latest television project – a campaign to revitalise the British textile industry from the, ahem, bottom up – is ripe with seaside postcard sauce.

In Mary’s Bottom Line, a three-part Channel 4 series, our heroine, enraged by the impossibility of buying British, exploits a what she sees as a minute window of opportunity to resuscitate UK manufacturing as oil, cotton and overseas labour prices rise. Like some pant demiurge, she waves her hand and wills into existence a new lingerie brand: Kinky Knickers.

Four months ago, Portas, 50, set up shop at the Headen & Quarmby textiles factory in Middleton – half an hour from central Manchester, yet a world away. Mary observes: “I’ve been to major cities, but I hadn’t been outside. To see the boys standing on streets with their broken mobile phones. They said, ‘I’ve never seen my mum and dad work, my grandparents work…’ .”

Thirty years ago, Middleton was an industrial hub with 11 clothing factories. Today, it is riddled with joblessness, while a fifth of its population is counted as young unemployed. A family firm since 1935, Headen & Quarmby ceased trading eight years ago. Portas says: “I was looking at what we gave away as a country. What we gave away was people, communities, a sense of belonging. The women there said, ‘It was like our family, Mary. My mother worked here, my sisters, three cousins over there. When the factory closed it was the worst day of my life.’ And we gave away that for sweatshops. The heartbreak of it.”

Mary recruited eight apprentices – five women and three men – aged 20 to 35. For their training, she turned to the “Old Nellies” (former local seamstresses) and Nottingham’s last stretch lacemaker, Jim Stacey. Portas has no financial stake in the Kinky Knicker brand – any profit is injected back into the business, and her pants, which retail at £10, are of a quality that a less philanthropic business would sell at three times the price.

Thus far, orders number 30,000, against a 100,000-knicker goal. The list of those whose livelihoods have been turned around include not only the apprentices, but the packaging creators and delivery people… and the publican who hosts her workers on a Friday evening.

Still, Portas is frustrated: “I could go out into the street and replicate this success 10 times over. We have a real opportunity here. We have, at most, a decade to get manufacturing back on its feet, otherwise all the experienced professionals will be retired, gaga or dead. I wanted to create a place that was about people and a sense of themselves. Bring that back, and the products and the manufacturing will come. What do these people need? They need to be trained; they need a sense of belonging. That’s what UK manufacturing’s about, not competing with China. We don’t need to compete. We can create something else.

“People say manufacturing will never come back, but you can make it come back. Marks & Spencer sells 61 million pairs of knickers a year: all imported. Put a million of those back into the UK. Sort it out!”

She stresses she is not anti-value, just anti the cheapness that comes at the price of ethical values. “You know what the truth of this is: stop being so ------- greedy. It’s greed and gain that got us into the state this country’s in today.

“We think more about what we put in our mouths, ‘I’ll eat that organic chicken because those other chickens were cooped up.’ What about what we do to people?”

If Mary Portas didn’t exist, no one would have the bravura to invent her: pugnacious, spirited, but with a softer, caring side that she has accessed in spades for this venture. The reason Portas makes such sterling television is that she is the same in the flesh; foremost among a generation of secular Channel 4 evangelists – Jamie, Hugh, Kirsty, Gok – who go on the gogglebox to change something. “We talk about the Big Society. This is it at its best, babe. This is putting the power back into the people.”

This is her most testing project yet, she says: “It is the single most wonderful, brilliant thing I’ve ever done and I’d love to do it again and again and again.”

When Channel 4 funding ends [see box, right], the enterprise will hinge on the laws of supply and demand. However, with orders plentiful, Headen & Quarmby is already in a position to take on more staff.

Of course, Mary wouldn’t be Mary without harbouring more epic ambitions: “My knickers are made in Middleton. Kate Middleton. I love the idea that if she just said, ‘Get behind British’… I just want to talk to her. I was wondering if I could do a seal to say, ‘This is British’, that people could use on other products. I think it’s sort of her responsibility… All I need is for her to say, ‘I believe in this’… to go, ‘Come on, bring it back home’.”

And what a home. The textile industry has been woven into Britain’s foundations from the Bronze Age. By the 12th century, wool was becoming England’s greatest asset. Soon, every village had its Sheep Street, Parliament its Woolsack, and a young Shakespeare journeyed to London via drovers’ roads. Before we became a nation of shopkeepers, we were a land of looms. Portas discovered that even the famous Calais lace trade was built on Nottingham technology, shipped across the Channel to avoid punitive government taxes.

Ah, yes, government. Portas has become embroiled in politics as the Tories’ “high street tsar”. She has made 28 recommendations, published last December, to which Team Cameron will respond this month. One of these, Portas’s Pilots, is already in progress, with high streets competing for 12 shares of a £1 million sprucing fund, plus a dose of Portas’s invincible dynamism.

She refuses to be stymied by bureaucracy: “I try to work with [Local Government Minister] Grant Shapps, and also Steve Hilton [the PM’s director of strategy]. I just love Steve. He pops into our meetings in his socks, and I tower over him and we give him a group hug and say, ‘What can we do?’ And then I let them make it happen.”

“And truthfully, I’ll just be a TV whore. If they don’t do it, I’ll go on and do it myself on television. I would like the Government to get behind this new enterprise, but I haven’t worked out what I’m going to ask them. Really, what I’d like them to do is to say to every retailer, ‘You’ve got to put 10 per cent back.’ Imagine: 10 per cent of your production to be UK-made … putting youngsters into bloody colleges, training and NVQs that there are no jobs for when they come out. Put them back on to skills.”

She would love to talk grammar schools with the Education Secretary, Michael Gove. She attended a then-grammar in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, in the 1970s, and she regards them as a vital route for working-class children to secure access to education.

Her own children, Mylo, 18, and Verity, 16 – from her former marriage to chemical engineer Graham Portas – look to be university-bound. Yet she does not feel it is right for everyone. Given current economic straits, she says future generations will need to be ever more entrepreneurial.

“I’d love the next generation who are coming out of university to think, ‘I’ve got an idea. I can do this.’ There’s so much talent. We’ve seen it with The Telegraph Shop Awards [announced in the Saturday magazine, Feb 25].

“And that is why I will fight to my dying day on my point on this with [Chancellor George] Osborne”, she continues, “Unless we free up and give them some sort of business rates rebate to get them on to the high street, we’ll never have tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

“And, actually, this is a capitalist society. Unless we get tomorrow’s capitalists, we’re going to be a capitalist society without any bloody capitalists.”

As to the recent fracas over the pros and cons of work experience, Portas takes the Cameron line: “Where it is done properly, it’s done phenomenally well. I do work experience and I’ve probably given about 10 jobs to people on that. Hands on, you spot people and you think, ‘Wow’.”

Later, on removing my own Portas pants, I come across evidence of one such “wow” moment, in the form of a ribbon stating: “Proudly made in Britain by Andrew”.

Andrew turned up at his job interview in a comically large borrowed suit, looking 18. In fact, the 20-year-old is a father who left school with no qualifications, and wants his son to know what it is like to have a parent in work.

Would I, and will others, pay a few pounds more for our underwear in order to make Andrew walk tall? Damn right we would.